


The Dragon and the Drunk

by airshipmechanic



Series: The Magnificent Dragons [1]
Category: The Magnificent Seven (2016)
Genre: AU - His Majesty's Dragon, Brotp, Friendship, Gen, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-28
Updated: 2019-04-28
Packaged: 2020-02-08 14:02:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,344
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18624730
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/airshipmechanic/pseuds/airshipmechanic
Summary: In a world where dragons live alongside humans, serve in their militaries, and affect their cultures, history goes down a lot differently for a lot of people, including Sam Chisolm and Goodnight Robicheaux. Nonetheless, some friendships are always meant to happen, and some people are always going to need saving.(Sam is a dragon, Goodnight is a mess, and they meet in the world of Naomi Novik's Temeraire novels, approximately forty years after the last of those books.)





	The Dragon and the Drunk

In a world without dragons, history might have gone a lot differently. 

Samuel thought about that sometimes: what might the world have been like, without dragons? It was a strange thought for a dragon to have, probably, but Sam was unusual in a lot of ways. Compared to other dragons, for instance, he had very little interest in glitter and wealth - he’d developed a taste for ebony, obsidian, and hematite fresh out of the egg and never got properly interested in gold. He didn’t have any human companions, either, and that was unusual even in the Far West - he didn’t tend to share why, and other dragons, blunt though they could be, knew better than to ask. If a dragon as old as Samuel had not even one human, that was never for any _good_ reason, and to ask why would undoubtedly be an unkindness. He was an odd one, so if he wanted to sit and think about what a dragonless world might be like and how its history might have unfolded while he was warming his scales on a desert rock, well, it was really just a drop in the bucket of his oddness. 

Probably the slave trade would have continued a lot longer, he thought. In the earlier part of the century, the African dragons had begun taking their people home and reclaiming their lands from the white men. Without the dragons, Sam wondered if there would even be any people left in Africa who actually belonged in Africa. Would human slavery have continued on the American continents, if the dark-skinned people had no dragons to defend them? Would it ever have started, if the white men didn’t have dragons on their side? Would the Chinese empire have been able to capture the Western coast of America without their incredible superiority of air power? Probably not, given that their humans didn’t take to the European habit of guns much. Guns, Sam knew all too well, were extremely powerful weapons in the hands of humans who could use them well. The natives of this land, too, would not have fared so well - their dragons were powerful, skilled, and shrewd. Without them, the way diseases had swept through with the Europeans would have brought an end to countless tribes, and no one would have been there to protect the ones who remained. Even so, it had taken the Incan Empire the better part of this century to recover from the brutality and loss of the one before it. 

Which of the European powers might have swept in then to take the lands they’d encroached on in the northern American continent? The British colonists on the east coast were a scrappy bunch - they’d managed to make a country of their own even without air power or a navy of their own, after all. Then there were the French to both the north and the south, the Spanish further south than that-- 

Sam huffed a laugh, finding himself unable to stretch his imagination far enough to imagine the French or the Spanish without dragons. It was past time to go, anyway - he had work to do if he was going to keep himself in money enough to go on eating, so he couldn’t be spending all day lounging around and considering fantasy worlds. 

He stretched his wings as he rose, deep brown and purple scales shining in the sun. He felt badly for the dragons in other places, sometimes, the ones who didn’t have naturally warm ground to rest on. The dragons in the far north, he’d heard, had heated pavilions built to rest on, but that tended to tie one down, didn’t it? There had been a time when Samuel had aspired to such things, but now the idea of it just reminded him too much of a life long lost. Now he was, if not _happy_ to keep moving, at least content with his lot. 

Adjusting the silver badge attached to his wide black collar, Sam pushed off from the ground and took flight, abandoning his afternoon’s musings. He had a bounty to bring in.

* * * * *

Sam was grateful for the heavy Chinese and Native influence on the western part of the continent. It meant towns were much more friendly to dragons, and much more readily designed for them. The streets were wide enough to walk down, there would usually be at least one cook in town who worked in dragon-sized portions, and people had the sense to hood their horses with something to prevent them seeing or smelling dragons and promptly panicking that they were about to be eaten.

Sam snorted to himself as he walked through the broad main avenue of the town. _As if anyone would want to eat a horse._ Not that he hadn’t, in some particularly bad and starving times, but he could smell carnitas in the air. Who would want a horse to eat when there were carnitas? Rich with onion and garlic, cumin and chili powder, maybe drizzled with crema, a delicate whiff of cilantro for a garnish…

The dragon’s stomach grumbled. He didn’t think he had been _that_ hungry, but the smell of carnitas spoke to the stomach through the soul. Still, it would have to wait. Get paid, then get fed.

Sam straightened his shoulders and headed on down to the town’s largest saloon, thankful that though his target was a murderous waste of air, his flaws did not include a prejudice against dragons. While Sam was more than capable of extracting a bounty from those vile “Humans Only” places, it was a lot more of a hassle. This was easy. Step in, order up a serving of dragon whiskey, then find a seating area with space for a heavyweight (usually not too hard, the smaller dragons tended to make way for any bigger than them), and sip slowly while waiting for the target to enter. Once he did, snapping him up would be easy. Humans didn’t expect dragons to be bounty hunters - and to be fair, most dragons were not cut out for the profession. It required a level of patience that most dragons didn’t have...but as ever, Sam wasn’t an ordinary dragon. 

When the outlaw known as El Cuchillo walked in, Sam slipped one of his talons into the front pocket of his harness, where he kept all his important papers. Like arrest warrants, for instance. He always liked to take a look for confirmation before he picked a criminal up, just to be absolutely certain he had the right man. Sam was a consummate professional, no mistakes and no messes. Once he was sure, he folded up the warrant and rose from his seat, whiskey left to sit on the table. 

“Fernando Lopez?” he asked, very polite. 

“Who wants to know?” The man glared up at him, which was unusual. The average human, faced with a dragon of Sam’s size, couldn’t find the nerve for a glare. Of course, the average human also didn’t have the kind of criminal resume that Fernando “El Cuchillo” Lopez could boast of. 

“My name’s Samuel,” the dragon said, leaning his head (which was larger than the outlaw’s entire body), closer down. “Duly sworn warrant officer from Wichita, Kansas. And one of those warrants is for Fernando Lopez, also known as El Cuchillo, who coincidentally shares your height, weight, build, and facial scar. So…” 

El Cuchillo, while evidently not a very clever character, was very fast with his namesake. He pulled the knife and tried to stab it into Sam’s eye all in one fluid motion. Sam was always ready for a bounty to attempt something rash, though, and pulled back so all the blade did was wedge itself uncomfortably between the scales covering his chin. The outlaw hadn’t really expected but so much success - he was just trying to distract Sam long enough to make a run for it. 

It didn’t work. Sam reached out to snatch him up in his talons, fast as when he’d go hunting for dinner between towns, and narrowed his eyes at the man. “I’m beginning to think you took to breaking the law because you’re just too blessed dumb for anything else.” 

Without wasting any more words on the matter, Sam took the wriggling outlaw to the sheriff, depositing him in a cell with a flick of his talon. He collected the bounty (a very fine one that would easily get him all the carnitas he could eat), and satisfied with his day’s work began making his way back down the streets of San Antonio.

* * * * *

Goodnight Robicheaux had done his very best to be the same man he’d been before he lost his dragon.

With Angelique, he had been a hero. They had fought in the War for Acadian Independence, joining their neighbors in throwing off the yokes of both America and France. They’d gone to war with the Mississippi Nation, too, helping to take more land into Acadia, the land once known as the Louisiana Territory. The two of them were known as the deadliest lightweight pair in the whole Acadian Army. From Angelique’s bright blue back, he could see the whole of a battlefield, picking off men as easily as the clay pigeons that had been his first moving targets. The Angel of Death, they had called him, and back then it had felt like something to be proud of. He fought for the freedom and safety of his home and family, and he thought that he was entitled to take any lives he needed to in that cause. 

The Acadian Army had won, but Goodnight Robicheaux had not, and a hero was not what he felt like anymore.

He tried to tell stories and laugh, but neither sounded right. His suits were pressed, his boots and watch chain polished, and the silk tie around his neck still felt like a noose no matter how neatly it coordinated with his waistcoat. He went out to the bars on Bourbon Street with his old friends, but triumphant talk of the war made his skin crawl. His friends’ reaction when he walked away from an insult rather than calling a man out had put him off even attempting to go out in town anymore. 

He found it harder to take a life after seeing Angelique killed. How could he put anyone else through this kind of pain, for any reason? They had killed other dragons and killed the men on their backs, and for what? Land and governments? There were things worth killing for, Goodnight thought, but he had a hard time thinking anymore that land and governments were among them. They weren’t worth this. He told his sister once that it felt like he’d lost a leg, but he didn’t _love_ his leg. He’d give up both his legs without hesitation to fly with Angelique even one more time. There was no way to properly explain “a part of myself is gone and I will never get it back” to someone who had never been bonded with a dragon. Even losing a sibling or a lover couldn’t compare, to Goodnight’s mind - he’d done both, he’d wept near endless tears for Armand and Oliver when they each killed in battle, and that pain still couldn’t match the pain of losing Angelique. 

He couldn’t even look at his homeland anymore, because all he saw when he looked at the Spanish moss in the trees was Angelique’s wings hanging broken and bloody. A summer storm would blow through, and the thunder took him straight back to the artillery fire, the cannons and heavy guns that had destroyed his beautiful lady and broken him for good. The blue of the Gulf looked like the scales that ran down her back from head to tail. Angelique was _everywhere_ in this place where the two of them had grown up together. 

The time came that he couldn’t take it any longer. He had to go. No amount of whiskey would dull the pain, no condolences would ease the grief, and no reassurances would quiet the guilt, but maybe he could get somewhere far enough away that he at least wouldn’t have his losses and mistakes perpetually shoved in his face. 

He didn’t tell anyone, not even what remained of his family. Goodnight just packed a single bag and walked out the back door to the stables, thinking about how Angelique would have sniffed at him riding a _horse_ instead of flying with her. She’d had one of her little jealous snits nearly every time he’d done it in the old days, and convincing her to stop being a brat had usually required either a nice present (she liked silver and opals and seashells) or a lengthy reading of Shakespeare in the original English. What he was doing now, riding a horse all the way to Texas, would probably have required jeweled Chinese talon sheaths and the entirety of _Romeo and Juliet_ with different voices for every character. 

But his high-maintenance _cherie_ was gone, never to complain of his behavior again, unless dragons and humans shared an afterlife and she could give him the business over this after he finally succeeded in drinking himself to death. She had been his courage, Goodnight thought, and he didn’t know where to find any more. Not enough to eat his own rifle and end it, and not enough to brush himself off and get back to living like a man again. Maybe out where people didn’t treat him as a war hero, one of them would be obliging enough to end it for him. If not, there was always the craven, yet genteel, option of suicide by whiskey and tobacco. At least this way, whatever happened, his mother wouldn’t have to watch.

* * * * *

Houston hadn’t been far enough away. Too green, too humid, too easy to track him down. Further west, then, to San Antonio. He was drunk, as usual, and cheating at cards. He didn’t even deny it when he was accused, just laughed.

“Was I?” Goodnight shrugged, collecting his winnings and turning to walk out the door of the saloon. He didn’t make it far, of course - it had been some of the lowest-quality cheating he’d ever done, barely concealed, and this was a town where nobody knew his name or his face. The men he’d cheated were more than happy to toss him up against a wall and rifle his pockets for their money and then beat the hell out of him for their pride. 

Even if Goodnight hadn’t been more or less deliberately looking for punishment, he was too drunk to be any good in a fight at the moment. _This might be it_ , a cruelly enthusiastic voice whispered in his head. Maybe this was the fight he wouldn’t walk away from. He might not be brave enough to kill himself and go to whatever Hell might await, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t exhausted. The idea of being _done_ sounded more attractive than Goodnight liked to admit. 

“What’s going on here?” 

The voice was loud and authoritative. Not human. A dragon, then, and judging by the way all four of the men who’d been so intent on wrecking his pretty face came to a very sudden stop, probably a big one. 

Sure enough, a heavyweight Chisolm, head broad enough to fill the whole alley even without his ruff raised, leaned down over them. The four men all gaped up at him, and the one who’d been holding Goodnight so his friend could hit him dropped Goodnight abruptly to the ground. 

“That’s a good start,” the dragon said approvingly. “Now shoo.” 

One of the attackers was stammering something out, maybe an apology? Between the whiskey and the beating, Goodnight’s ears were ringing too badly to be sure. From his spot on the alley’s filthy ground, Goodnight looked up at his draconic savior with a bitter laugh coming out of a sideways drunken smile. “Why’d you wanna go saving a piece of drunken trash like me?” 

“Because I don’t like an unfair fight,” the dragon said. “Why didn’t you want me to?”

“Because I’ve got nothing to live for, but I’m too scared to die,” Goodnight drawled, and there was that laugh again, the one that didn’t actually seem to see anything funny. He stayed on the ground, letting the smells of blood and whiskey and vomit meld into another punishment to go with the pain. He looked up at the dragon, bigger by a factor of ten than Angelique had been, and took in the brown and purple scales, the deep brown eyes with slitted pupils, and…

Goodnight squinted a little. “Is that a knife in your face?” 

“I’d forgotten about that.” The dragon sighed and wriggled his nose, as if he could dislodge it that way, and in spite of himself and his misery, Goodnight found himself laughing. The sight was just so ridiculous and sad at once that he couldn’t help identifying heavily with it, and that couldn’t be anything but funny. 

“Ah, _putain de merde_...here, let me--” He kept laughing and dragged himself upright, placing a hand on the dragon’s chin for balance once he got to his feet. The dragon obligingly kept still, though not without a somewhat suspicious look. Goodnight took a look at the angle of the knife and pulled it out with a single sharp tug. 

...which of course threw him off balance, and promptly knocked him back onto his ass in the alley. Now he and the dragon were _both_ laughing, and it was the happiest Goodnight had been in more than a year. That didn’t make a lick of sense, because he was bloody, broken, broke, and filthy, but his life hadn’t made sense for a long time. 

When they’d both gotten control of themselves, the dragon held out one of his long black talons to help Goodnight back to his feet once more. “I’m Samuel,” the dragon said, and rather than give his _official_ introduction, he went for a more sociable approach. “Bounty hunter, out of Wichita.” 

“Goodnight Robicheaux,” the human replied with a flourishing bow. “Drunk, out of money.” 

That got another deep draconic chuckle. It was a good joke, if a bitter one. “You’re awful comfortable with dragons,” Sam said. 

“I used to belong to one,” Goodnight replied, and the sorrow on his face and in his voice gave Sam some idea of how he’d come to be in the mess he was. A dragon’s lifespan was, on average, three times that of a human. They expected to lose the humans they bonded with. That didn’t make it easy, of course, especially when those humans were lost not to old age but to violence or illness, but it was still something that a dragon always knew would happen. Humans, on the other hand, expected their dragons to outlast them. It could make the loss harder to take in some ways, Sam suspected. 

“I used to belong to a lady,” Sam replied, because unlike most, he actually did understand the pain this human was feeling. He’d never handled it quite like this, but...well, everyone’s story was a little different, wasn’t it? Who was he to judge? There but for the grace of God and all that. Maybe this human needed the same thing Sam had needed when Cora and her family were killed: just a little help, and a little kick in the flank. 

Sam looked back over his shoulder, then once more down at Goodnight. “You like carnitas?” 

Goodnight blinked, having a little trouble putting the question into a context that would make it make sense. “I...yes?” 

“Come on, then,” Sam said. “We’ll get some dinner.” 

The dragon turned around, clearly expecting that Goodnight would follow. He was a creature accustomed to being obeyed. And Goodnight, entirely too drunk and bloody to think of anything else to do, fell right into line. He had no idea that the dragon was about to save his life in a whole new way.

**Author's Note:**

> There will definitely end up being a Goodnight/Billy shippy follow-on to this, because I have a Mag7 AU problem and also a Goodnight/Billy problem.


End file.
